He had behaved unwisely, too. Why should he not have gone to see her when she returned? By doing so, and acting cleverly, he could have avoided trouble with his aunt, and also these annoying newspaper paragraphs. Also he could have avoided the scene with Ledwith--and the aborted reconciliation just now with Strelsa, where he had stood staring at the apparition of Mary Ledwith as lost souls stand transfixed before the pallid shades of those whom they have destroyed. At his lodge-gate a half-cowering dog fawned on him and he kicked it aside. The bruised creature fled, and Sprowl turned in at his gates and walked slowly up the cypress-bordered drive. * * * * * He thought it all out that night, studied it carefully. What he needed was distraction from the present torment. Mary Ledwith could give that to him. What a fool she had been ever to imagine that she could be anything more than his temporary mistress. "The damned little idiot," he mused--"cutting away to Reno before I knew what she was up to--and involving us both in all that talk! What did she flatter herself I wanted, anyway.... But I ought to have called on her at once; now it's going to be difficult." Yet he sullenly welcomed the difficulty--hoped that she'd hold out. That was what he wanted, the excitement of it to take his mind from Strelsa--keep him interested and employed until the moment arrived once more when he might venture to see her again. He was, by habit, a patient man. Only in the case of Strelsa Leeds had passion ever prematurely betrayed him; and, pacing his porch there in the darkness, he set his teeth and wondered at himself and cursed himself, unable to reconcile what he knew of himself with what he had done to the only woman he had ever wished to marry as a last resort. * * * * * For two weeks Sprowl kept to himself. Few men understood better than he what was the medicinal value of time. Only once had he dared ignore it. So one evening, late in August, still dressed in knickerbockers and heather-spats, he walked from his lawn across country to make the first move in a new game with Mary Ledwith. Interested, confident, already amused, and in far better spirits than he had been for many a day, he strode out across the fields, swinging his walking-stick, his restless eyes seeing everything and looking directly at nothing. Which was a mistake on his part for once, because, crossing a pasture corner, his own bull, advancing silently from a clump of willows, nearly caught him; but Sprowl went over the fence and, turning, brought down his heavy stick across the brute's ringed nose; and the animal bellowed at him and tore up the sod and followed along inside the fence thundering his baffled fury as long as Sprowl remained in sight.